Southern varieties of Dutch use the 1st person plural form of the possessive pronoun ons as a marker of consanguinity with proper names, as in ons Emma ‘Emma, our consanguineous family member’. This use of ons ‘our’ has some remarkable properties: It is incompatible with adjectival modification and contrastive stress. These properties are shared with a construction from Standard Dutch: complex prenominal s- possessors consisting of the 1st person singular form of the possessive pronoun and a kinship term as in mijn vaders fiets ‘my father's bike’. We propose that both these constructions are constructional idioms (Booij 2002), a lexical template with a variable part. This offers a straightforward account of the properties of these constructions.*

The name of the Old English s-rune, sigil, as found in various medieval manuscripts, is puzzling, as it is the only Anglo-Saxon rune name that is etymologically a loan word. This article examines the variant spelling <sygil> found only in MS Codex Vindobonensis 795, arguing that the spelling with <y> is a scribal interpolation. In addressing how an Old High German-speaking scribe might have come to make such an interpolation it is argued that the word sugil found in Continental runica abecedaria ought to be considered an Old High German lexeme relevant to this discussion. A novel etymology for words for ‘sun’ in Germanic is presented, particularly for forms derived from the l-stem variants of the Proto-Indo-European heteroclite.

Three-position (catalectic) verses in fornyrðislag are fully integrated with their regular, four-position counterparts, and accordingly composed in strict conformity to the four-position principle through alignment of the verse-final drop with null linguistic material. However, they are produced only exceptionally in violation of the same principle in Beowulf and Genesis A. With maximal fidelity to the principle, Beowulf almost categorically disallows such short verses, whereas Genesis A, constrained by the principle to a lesser extent, is more liberal in accepting them, as with other metrical operations controlled by the canon, such as anacrusis. Far from random accidents, however, these anomalous verses are most likely to arise under a cluster of syntagmatic conditions: i) The missing element constitutes a verse-final drop; ii) it is preceded by two consecutive lifts. Given the two forces working in optimal combination, the configuration PPx occurs with the highest incidence among the variants of three-position verses in these two Old English poems.*